The Soul StoneThis crystal is a spessartine, a manganese-bearing garnet. Spessartine gets its orange

The Soul StoneThis crystal is a spessartine, a manganese-bearing garnet. Spessartine gets its orange color directly from the presence of manganese in its structure.Elements such as iron or manganese in the middle of the periodic table tend to have d-orbital electrons present in their structure. The d-orbital shapes are funny – you may have seen balloon-like shapes that represent the d-orbitals in a chemistry class. When iron or manganese are sitting around on their own, the electrons won’t care which of the d-orbitals they are in. But, if you surround those atoms with 6 oxygen atoms, as commonly happens in minerals like spessartine, something important changes. 2 of the d-orbitals wind up closer to the electron clouds of the oxygen atoms than the other 3 orbitals, and since negative charges repel, the electrons try to move to the 3 orbitals that are farther away from the oxygen atoms. It takes a little bit of energy to move the electron into the d-orbital closer to the oxygen, and that amount of energy commonly falls in the range supplied by visible light. So, for metal ions – light has just the right amount of energy to move an electron from the orbital far from the oxygen to the orbital closer to the oxygen, causing it to absorb visible light.Spessartine gets its orange color from the electrons in manganese, absorbing visible light and bouncing from one d-orbital to another.Many garnets are high density minerals, and they commonly form when the rocks are buried underground. Intrusive igneous rocks, as can form deep beneath volcanoes, and metamorphic rocks at the cores of mountain ranges are common places for spessartines to grow.-JBBImage credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spessartine-spesstn-67b.jpgReference:https://www.dakotamatrix.com/mineralpedia/8111/spessartinehttp://minerals.gps.caltech.edu/COLOR_Causes/Metal_Ion/index.html -- source link

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